Hey there OpenMode-heads,

I figure if you read this thing it means you like to suffer in that specific way that comes with reading my writing (not a word of a lie, typing that out put the Mellencamp chorus in my head - “life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.” Make of that what you will), so I figured I’d tell you I had an op/ed in the Des Moines Register the other day, here: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/iowa-view/2026/04/12/data-centers-electricity-prices-water-use-employment/89525608007/ There’s a non-paywalled version here: https://archive.is/xGt4F

The gist is that powerful actors take on a ‘we’re all in this together’ posture to claim building data centers are a rising tide that will lift all boats, but the truth is the only role we have on their boat is to serve and to get tossed overboard when they think it’s necessary, and data centers make that second outcome more likely. As American Steel sang a while back, the task is “destroy their future before it kills us.” (https://americansteel.bandcamp.com/album/destroy-their-future) So yeah, check out the op/ed if you want.

As long as I’m writing now I thought I’d add two things, one about my rationale for writing that thing and things like it, and the other tying together some concepts I’ve thought about previously. On the first, briefly, I’m not under any illusions about powerful actors having their minds changed. If you speak truth to power, power tends to smirk then smack you in the mouth. So why speak truth? Because, in part, it’s worth trying to clear out some space, sweep away some of the bullshit we’re flooded with in order to have a bit of room to think, and, in part, because I think there’s a thing that happens where many of us think something but what we think is rarely said in any of the official, respectable forms of representing our world. What happens then is that what is objectively a majority or at least a very large minority gets turned into a bunch of individuals who each tend to feel like an isolated minority of one. That’s painful. And since I’ve got some minimal writing ability, such as it is, which combine with some frankly embarrassing official credentials to make it so I can occasionally manage to get shit in places like the Register to provide a small, brief respite from the bullshit that makes people feel alone, I feel like I should try to do so when I can. More important, though, I think, are matters of organization, including in the form of building our own oppositional public alternatives - not public only in the sense of state owned, but in the sense of shared by and in part constitutive of some collectivity, some constituency: locations and institutions and practices for creating a ‘we’ and within which that ‘we’ deliberates in various ways.

On the second, concepts I’ve worked a bit with - a while back I wrote something on Don Hamerquist’s understanding of what he called epistemological breaks, meaning sudden shifts in how people think and feel and act, shifts away from and in conflict with business as usual in this society. (https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/a-letter-on-epistemological-breaks-morality-and/) I suggested one of those breaks was underway regarding orientation to border enforcement. Not to be smug, but I think events in Minneapolis in opposition to ICE bear this out.

I’ve also been reading Raymond Williams a fair bit for a few months now. I keep coming back to his basic schematic of dominant culture that subordinates and is challenged by alternative and oppositional cultures. (Alternative meaning different but not a threat; oppositional meaning a threat to the dominant.) These terms name some basic political relationships which could be represented statically - dominant’s a pyramid sitting on top of two squares, labeled alternative and oppositional. Williams puts this analysis in time dynamically by the addition of two additional terms, residual and emergent. Residual culture is old stuff, often holdovers from past elements of the dominant culture. Emergent culture is new stuff. This means there can be residual alternatives - I like to point to Amish people as an example - and residual oppositional cultures, like elements of the Catholic Worker movement. And there can be emergent alternatives - new subcultures, say - and emergent oppositional cultures - new forms of or reasons for strident activism and organizing. What I wanted to say about this is really just the very simply point that it occurred to me tonight that Hamerquist’s epistemological break can be thought as a sudden turn to being oppositional, whether from out of pockets of the dominant culture or alternative cultures. That is, an epistemological break in its negative sense breaks holes within the dominant culture (along these lines there’s an old line, I believe from the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, that each of us have a cop in our head and we have to get him out of there - when a lot of people de-cop-ify their heads that’s an epistemological break, descriptively speaking), and in a positive sense an epistemological break is the coming into or the making of a different set of values, analyses, social visions, practices, etc. In other words, an epistemological break is an active, rapid, and specifically oppositional political process which is also a labor and production process - an unmaking, remaking, and making anew of parts of social life.

To be clear I think this ‘that thinker and this thinker are connected actually’ kind of thing I’m doing here in bridging Williams and Hamerquist is of limited value, I think it is of some value, however limited. Williams helps give a picture of the larger backdrop and longer slower social processes in motion and provide some additional descriptive detail of the concepts involved in an epistemological break and in the dominant culture’s opposition to breaks. Hamerquist helps provide some clarity on how these changes are not always a matter of slow social evolution but are sometimes very rapid and intense, and on some of the tasks for political practice in relation shifts in dominant, alternative, and oppositional cultures, which strike me as really important.

Alright, that’s it. Over and out!